Lulled By Numbers
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: Not all of the Forsaken leave the Scourge upon awakening.


Title: Lulled By Numbers

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Warcraft

Rating: T

Disclaimer: Warcraft belongs to Blizzard Entertainment.

Summary: Not all Forsaken leave the Scourge.

- - - - -

She doesn't know when she becomes conscious of herself. _Herself_, like an individual. The others are not singular like her, and this is uncomfortable. The will of Ner'zhul is like the drone of bees, and her ears have long since closed to the sound of rain, to the murmur of human voices. The undead do not speak to each other so much as understand. There is an undercurrent between them, and it is hunger.

She is hungry now too, she realizes.

The floor is grey beneath her feet, made up of wooden planks that have been bleached by the weather and time, and little splinters catch here and there. She does not know what the floor is for at first, and wonders that she would even know such a thing. But it stays beneath her feet resolutely, comfortably, like it belongs there.

It is a place to keep her feet from touching the ground, something says. With her withered feet (_she has __**feet**_) that do not feel cold or pain, she wonders why anyone would have to do that. This body doesn't remember hurt.

This body doesn't remember itself either, and that makes her feel bad for some reason. It's heavy in her chest, where she thinks it might be hollowed out, and sits like a stone between the bones that make the cradle of her hips. Like something to be born.

You are sad, she thinks, and the words had always been there, she had just misplaced them between her throat and tongue. She feels the muscles of her face jump, move to form letters. She almost remembers her teeth, the slide of her tongue across the palette of her mouth, and the little timid noises it could make if she breathed between them.

She sits for a long time looking at the floor. She does not speak like she wishes because she does not know how to breathe anymore.

- - - - -

Her mind still does not know time, but what little of her is thinking for itself knows that time has passed. She cannot recall the measure of it, or the signs of it, but she knows that _something_ has moved between her first moment of self and now.

She has moved from her floor into the outside, and she only knows to call it that because of how wide she feels in it, defined by her bits of flesh. She is terrified of the sun, of the heat and brightness of it, but she cannot leave it. It is familiar in the way that her feet are. It does not feel the same as it once did, but it is something that is hers to have.

There is the shuffle of others around her, the slow-step and drag of the others. The undead. She feels nothing for them, not the stiffness of the fear that she had for the sun mere moments ago, not that weighty little sadness inside her belly either. She has been one of them for so long that she can imagine herself (_and now she can do that too_) doing her own shuffle step about the grey wooden floors. Knowing she can move, and choose to do so, has not dimmed that gnawing, greedy hunger that they share in their afterlife, not yet anyway.

She stares at the sun, unmoving. The others turn circles about her, not able to stop even for a moment. Their restlessness is not cowed by the sun. Instead they toughen like leather, and can only be miserable as their bodies fall into further decay. They don't know how to stop.

But she? She lets herself rot on purpose. (_She knows purpose and intent._)

- - - - -

She relearns to sleep on accident. She couldn't help herself when she closed her eyes and fell asleep on a ledge of stone, a wall of a scummy fountain. Her body was heavy in a way that sadness didn't bring, and while she would have been content to revel in that passing feeling of being drained, she instead closes her eyes, as she has taught herself.

She does not think she can relearn to dream. She finds that she doesn't want to. She may know intent now, but she hasn't learned reason, and so she cannot explain to herself that sudden reluctance. That also makes her sad.

The ghouls must think she has stopped functioning. They simply pass her.

- - - - -

The hunger is different this time, a kind that burns and makes her tired, more than she often is. She still has not learned to sleep with any regularity, and she still can only make the shallowest of inhales, something that feels vaguely familiar, if a little useless. Some thought makes her think of phantom limbs, of warriors trying to use legs and arms that aren't there anymore, and she shrinks away from this unfamiliar territory. If she cannot say her own words, she does not want to think of others that she does not know saying them instead.

This shrinking back burns in a way that is different from both the sun and the hunger. It coils behind her eyes, curls her fists. Her mind supplies another unspeakable word: anger.

There are houses and windows where she's at, things built up above floors and grounds. Like the floor is to protect her feet, the walls and ceilings are to protect her body. On the occasions that it rains, or that the sun is particularly fierce, she finds herself wandering to these more and more, climbing up and down its stairs and walking through its empty spaces. It has gotten to a point that the other undead do not come into the house that she is in most often.

Being in the house, she finds herself feeling a little more substantial. The walls and furniture somehow define her. She knows how to use them like the others do not, and that somehow makes herself something more.

There are rats in the house of course, little crawling things that when she had first become aware of had startled her. They were different from her and the others. They felt warm when she caught them, and could make noises that probably meant something to each other but not to her. So they could talk. That made her angry as well, and she crushed them in her hands, digging small finger bones into the softness.

And these she ate. It is also familiar, moving things to her mouth, chewing, swallowing down the dry gullet of her throat. She cannot choke, but she still finds herself thinking about it, like it might have been a problem then, back there, sometime. It cures the burning in her stomach, or what should be a stomach, and for that she is glad. Happy. Primally content. These new words taste good too.

She likes feeling that way. She eats some more.

- - - - -

It is many passages of the sun before she realizes that she cannot hear the droning of Ner'zhul any longer. She can make out other sounds now, like walking and creaking wood, and on the rare occasion, birds. She finds those rare birds make her happy in away that eating does not, so she makes an effort to be especially quiet in case one drops by.

She likes to think of it as taking in visitors, waiting for those birds. She wants them to visit, like she can remember wanting others to visit. (_She had a dark-headed man somewhere inside her head, living. She could not distinguish him from reality, so many times he thought on him_.)

She shrugs, something else she has relearned.

Speaking is still beyond her, a full twelve passings of the sun later (_she counts_). The breath she can pull rattles between her ribs, almost painful with fullness. She cannot describe it. It feels like (_drowning_) burning, and when she remembers to exhale, it is quick and shearing. Her throat does not know the motions anymore. She does not think that she will ever be able to speak again.

From outside, the mindless dead continue their march. She watches them these days, from time to time. They pay her no mind, other than perhaps the occasional glance, that underlying hunger. She wonders if they know that she does not know the same hunger, the same drone. There is a mood that speaks of difference between them now, but she cannot bear to be parted from them. They are cold like her.

- - - - -

Andorhal.

She had known that things had names, not just functions in the way that floors and walls have, but places? Her world did not have a definition outside of her small house, and the copse of trees that occasionally a few brave birds would come to. But she pretends that there's nothing beyond her little perceptions, that the darkness beyond the walls is a sort of ending.

There should be nothing (_what is that?_) beyond it.

But she is picking mushrooms from the eaves of the house one day, little brown caps that she thinks taste different, maybe more satisfying than the rats that have been decreasing. The others do not eat them; they prefer to eat the remnants of each other. That nameless fear comes on her when she thinks of this, and the feel of teeth sits uncomfortably in her mind. She eats the mushrooms instead now, and does not choose the warm blood again.

The word, and she remembers more and more each day, more quickly, comes to her unexpectedly. That awkward feeling of swallowing again, choking she thinks, and _Andorhal_ is all she can think. Suddenly the buildings that are both close and far away are important.

_That was an inn_, she thinks, _and that is where my father troth plighted me to Vincent during midsummer, and I was wearing blue, and I thought we were going to be so happy and I..._

Stop. She makes herself stop. She's not even sure what this string of words means, even coming from herself. They don't usually come so fast. There is some sort of truth to them, some distant ache that if she knew the meaning of it would be all the more painful for it. As it is, she knows that there ought to be something profound about it.

She's dropped her armful of mushrooms by now, and looking at them strewn before her, she is suddenly very tired, but angry. Bitter. She is bitter. The hunger that she had prepared for her is dead in her belly, and all she wants to do is go into her house and sleep.

She tries. But she can't sleep. She's never not been able to when she wanted to in the past. Restlessness. Another word that she is becoming familiar with.

She tirelessly paces outside the house instead with the others. She strives to be as simple again.

- - - - -

It comes as a surprise to discover she is not the only sentient being in her small world. She has come to rely on that singularity, and watches. It is her purpose to watch, and be sorry that she cannot be the animals that the others are. Oh yes, she hunts for food, and ambles about, but she realizes that she is doing it, and it is very lonely.

She of course has made an effort to observe the physical differences as well. After all, that is what she instinctively looks for. But they are dead like her, and she sees little other than their equally tanned hides, the long gnarled nails, the slack-jaws. In life, as she imagines it might have been, they might have been quite different looking, even maybe act different.

_Equality in death_, she recalls from somewhere. Something written that she can't read anymore because she does not know the shape of words with her mouth or hand or eyes. But it is true, unreadable or not, because even in the little differences that she thinks she can pick out, like dark hair and long legs, she cannot see past the identical expression and need. They are one thing together, a community or an army perhaps.

She has runt he fine bones of her own hands over her the plant like fibers of her own hair before, of course. She knows that it is the brackish yellow of the dead grass, and that it hangs long and limp like cloth. It is caked with mud and sweat and she does not think that it will ever come clean. (_She is afraid of bathing, now that she knows what it is, because what if she comes apart in the water, like the dirt clumps that she grabs when hunting? Will she break into smaller pieces? Can she still yet die? She has no memory of drowning to go by._)

She does not know mirrors. She does not think that Andorhal was a wealthy enough town for there to be many. She especially doesn't know what she looks like. There is another word that she can say to herself when she happens on this feeling. Pride, or vanity. Maybe in the before time, before she was like this, and before the cold, burning of the Plague (_that is what it is_), she had been beautiful and now she cannot look at herself.

She is twisting dead-grass-like-her-hair when the other one comes, the one that can think and name and choose like she can. Perhaps not choose, she thinks as he draws closer, because some part of her speaks of the hive of the others, that constant drone. He, tall and waifish in the sun's waning, is not entirely like her at all.

He wears armor, and it shines in that dull light, a quiet orange and green of the noxious air here. The breastplate is tarnished, and her hands ache for grease and rags, something that she can clean without the water. He too wears a sword, and it is not so old or unused, but bright and sharp. That she does remember. Sometimes when she closes herself off from all else, she can remember horses and knights, and the raze of steel across her chest, leaving a rip in its wake. (_She had been much enamored of the prince of Lordaeron, as had more girls, and in his undeath, he had been as terrible and glorious as he was in life and all that brought weapons behind him. A shrieking host. She doesn't know why she would know any of that at all._)

He stops for a time in Andorhal, the not-like-her-but-is. And she can feel his gaze on her, if not his eyes. He cannot see her through the walls, which is her one comfort, though she does deign to walk out to gather a new crop from the side of a watchtower. For a time, she is certain of danger, of pain. She is not afraid of them as she had been, in the before or in the time that she became aware. It might be welcome to break up her monotony.

_Here is a chance_, she does not say, but mouths, _here is a chance to change this. I can be something else._

She slows, and picks another cap. The gaze is burning, almost challenging. He is waiting for her to step out of line, to do something stranger still. When she turns she means to meet his vision at some indeterminable spot between them.

The others continue to walk around her, as they always have, and this gives her some sort of confidence, like she is in a pack despite the change between them that both know if both cannot understand. She is thankful for them in some way.

It is enough.

She does not meet his gaze, whether for ill or good, and he does not push any further. (_They will finish with her later, she decides, and when they do she will welcome it like it is something to be greeted and pulled in for visiting like her birds._)

She slouches off towards her house with the floor and the walls and the windows that she can listen through. She does not want his differences. She does not want to be any more different than she already is from the collective she had been a part of.

They are cold like her.

- - - - -

End

- - - - -


End file.
